Helena Texier – Antigone Goes Beyond-The-Beyond – From The My Lady of the Ideal to the Malady of the Ideal
 
THE LETTER 34 (Summer 2005) pages 29-47
 
The quicker it comes the better.
I want to hurry death.
I want to be free of the dread
Of waking in the morning.
Waking up at night.
All I pray for now
Is the dawn of my last day.
 
Whatever the field of work, no-one whose door is fully open to the suffering subject will be able to avoid the encounter with the full deadweight of this tragic appeal to the possibility that death presents, and represents, as a release from – an ante-dote to – life. (From the obsessional to the suicide). The quotation given above will inevitably call someone to the mind of the practitioner here today, or perhaps it will echo something closer to home, a friend, a loved one, one’s own self even. Many of the participants here today will still have fresh in their minds the Dublin experience of the Joyce-Lacan Symposium, which one entered under the gaze of the unbearable lightness (21 grams to be precise) of the many hanging collars representing the many, many suicides. I take it that it is this tragic subject which the Forums invite us to consider here today in relation to Lacan’s seminar on Ethics, a seminar in the course of which, as the Forums noted in their preliminary statement to us, Lacan doesn’t give…